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Tuesday, December 4

Blowing Up The Moon

There was a lot of chatter last week, both on and
offline, about a reported plot by the
United States to ‘blow up the moon’ at the height of the Cold War. Drilling
down into the detail of the story, the plot centred around setting off a
nuclear bomb on the moon, with the accompanying mushroom cloud terrifying the
enemy of the time.

Coinciding with the story, here in the north-west of
England, we had some beautifully clear, frosty nights, and the full moon sat
there in the sky in all its un-bombed glory. I had to wonder about the guy who
decided it might be a neat idea to discharge a nuke up there. Perhaps he had
the rather stern children’s encyclopaedia
we had as children. In answer to the question ‘What is the Moon like?’,
it stated: ‘The Moon is very different from Earth. There is no air, no weather
and no life.’ Fair enough. But it went on: ‘It is a dreary, dusty place that is
boiling hot by day and freezing at night.’ Whoa! Yes, there may be extremes of
surface temperature. But dreary? I
don’t remember Armstrong’s ‘One small step…’ being followed by a polite yawn.
And dusty? It’s moon dust, people: not pet hair and dead skin.

What
Mr Moon Bomb and Encyclopaedia of the Unimaginative have in common is a total
disregard for the moon’s huge influence on mankind. That influence has been
both practical and cultural. (Mr Moon Bomb might also have missed the lesson on
the earth’s tides.) Those influences of course change over time.

Medieval
European astronomy had the Earth at the centre of the Universe, with the moon,
the sun and every other planet following our globe. God was responsible for
this perfect celestial order. One of the things determined by this order was
medical treatment. Physicians’ treatment manuals had details of the location of
the sun and the moon, as well as planetary movements. The time of onset of an
illness was important in determining both the cause and the treatment.
Instructions for the bleeding of patients took account of which planetary house
the moon was in.

For
the medieval world, planetary alignment could have far more deadly implications
for health. John Kelly, in his superb book on the Black Death, The Great Mortality, cites the Compendium de epidemia per Collegium
Facultatis Medicorum Parisius. The Compendium
is the work of the Paris medical masters of the time in trying to explain
the plague epidemic. In it, they conclude that responsibility for the plague is
due to a ‘configuration of the heavens’ on 20 March 1345, leading to a ‘deadly
corruption in the air.’ Jupiter, deemed
to be ‘wet and hot, and drawing up evil vapours from the earth’, and Mars, hot
and dry, came together and ignited vapours that were spread by high winds. Given that between 1345 to 1350, millions of
people died from the plague (estimates range from one half to one third of the
entire population of western Europe), it must have made the planets a
terrifying presence.

The
other source of terror comes from the moon’s mythology. Humans losing their
sanity or being transformed into wild beasts have long been attributed to a
full moon. Werewolves make their documented
appearance as far back as 500 BC, with the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar
imagining he had become one. Reports of werewolves persisted across central
Europe well past the medieval period and into the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. We’re less afraid of werewolves now, preferring them instead to be
the moody (and surprisingly un-hairy) third of an angst-and-fang-ridden love
triangle.

Okay,
so historically the moon’s had pretty bad press as some arbitrary harbinger of
death and destruction. But for all of the fears, the moon served older
civilizations than ours very well. Our modern western society likes its
artificial light- NASA’s photographs of the world at night light up the location
of our urban sprawl, our determination to take on the night and win. Our
medieval ancestors had no such weapons against the dark. What we consider to be
easy, getting from A to B outside of daylight hours, was hazardous in the
extreme for them. Travel was often planned around the moon, where its light
could make a journey possible. The phases of the moon were common, necessary
knowledge. As well as travel, people hoed, planted and mowed by moonlight. Thatchers could work by its light. There are
Swedish accounts of the very poorest carding wool by moonlight.

Most
people in medieval society could not read or write and knowledge was passed down
orally. Yet by the 17th century, with the revolution of printing
firmly underway, one of the most popular printed work was the almanac. An
almanac charted the moon’s progress in monthly tables, as well as providing
other information. A. Roger Ekirch’s wonderful At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime, tells of one in three
families in England possessing one. That’s an astonishing 400,000 copies. In
early America, almanacs were the most popular publication after the Bible. And
in these almanacs, we find each full moon named. In England, the first full
moon after the winter solstice (December 21) was ‘the moon after Yule’,
followed by the wolf and Lenten moons. The harvest moon and the hunter’s moon
are also included in there, terms with which we are probably still familiar.
But the egg moon, the flower moon? American versions differ: in one, January is
the wolf moon, followed by snow, storm, pink, flower, strawberry, buck,
sturgeon, harvest, hunter’s, beaver and cold. In another version, February is
the hunger moon, November the frost moon.

In my
medieval thriller, The Fifth Knight, I have several scenes that happen at
night. The story is based on Thomas Becket’s murder, which took place on
December 29, 1170. So I had to make sure I had a Yule moon in there, and the
night sky had to reflect what was happening as the story unfolds in time. I
think my characters who fight, chase, die and fall in love by moonlight and
starlight, would be horrified by the proposed actions of Mr Moon Bomb.

Horrified
too, I believe, would be the real inhabitants of the medieval world. I think
they would have been a lot happier with Mr Eugene Shoemaker. Shoemaker was a
legendary planetary geologist who died in a car accident in 1998. He had dreamt
of going to the moon, but a medical disorder prevented that from ever
happening. Instead, he taught the Apollo astronauts to be field geologists. As
a tribute to him, some of his ashes were carried to the moon aboard the Lunar
Prospector space probe in 1999. The capsule carrying his ashes was inscribed
with the following passage from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

And when he shall die

Take him and cut him out into little
stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so
fine

That all the world will be in love with
night,

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

Next time you see that big
old moon, say hi to Shoemaker- a man that gave to the moon, instead of trying
to blow it away. I love it that he’s there, and not the remains of a bomb. I’m
sure the medievals would too.

Note: The Fifth Knight can be found on Kindle
Serials at The Fifth Knight. At this time, only US
customers can purchase the serialized format. The book will be released in
complete format by Thomas & Mercer in 2013.

Sir Benedict Palmer returns to Germany on November 1 2016!

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About Me

E.M. Powell’s medieval thrillers THE FIFTH KNIGHT and THE BLOOD OF THE FIFTH KNIGHT have been #1 Amazon bestsellers and a Bild bestseller in Germany. Book #3 in the series, THE LORD OF IRELAND, was published by Thomas & Mercer on April 5 2016. Born and raised in the Republic of Ireland into the family of Michael Collins (the legendary revolutionary and founder of the Irish Free State), she now lives in northwest England with her husband, daughter and a Facebook-friendly dog. She is also a contributing editor to International Thriller Writers The Big Thrill magazine, blogs for English Historical Fiction Authors, reviews fiction & non-fiction for the Historical Novel Society and is part of the HNS Social Media Team. Find out more by visiting www.empowell.com.